Saturday, November 25, 2006

The other night a couple of clan clowns from Germany showed up at BOT House. I couldn't kick them with the usual program, Ban-O-Matic, due to their use of high ASCII characters, so I settled for dropping the whole /16 subnet while I figured out what to do about them.

The answer was Grep-O-Matic and that took care of them right away. Ban-O-Matic was just a simple string match. If someone got banned they could change their name by adjusting the upper and lower case characters in their nicks. It was due for an overhaul.

Once Grep-O-Matic was working, it got me to thinking about the clan boys. I figured what the heck - no one would miss them if they were gone, so I threw in a regex to catch all the common prefix styles I've seen.